Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who got crushed by President Donald Trump in 2016, came out on Tuesday and endorsed Joe Biden in his 2020 race.
She didn’t once mention the sexual assault allegations increasingly swirling around the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Tara Reade, who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her when she was an aide in 1993, ripped Clinton for “enabling a sexual predator.”
“I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I voted for her in the primary. I’m a lifelong Democrat. But yet, what I see now is someone enabling a sexual predator and it was my former boss, Joe Biden, who raped me,” Reade told Fox News. “Hillary Clinton has a history of enabling powerful men to cover up their sexual predatory behaviors and their inappropriate sexual misconduct. We don’t need that for this country. We don’t need that for our new generation coming up that wants institutional rape culture to change.”
She added: “I will not be smeared, dismissed or ignored. I stand in truth and I will keep speaking out.”
Reade said during a podcast in March that Biden pinned her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers without her consent in his Senate office in 1993. She was 29 at the time, Biden was 51.
“He greeted me, he remembered my name, and then we were alone. It was the strangest thing,” Reade said. “There was no like, exchange really. He just had me up against the wall.
“It happened all at once,” she said. “His hands were on me and underneath my clothes, and he went down my skirt and then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers and he was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me.
“I remember him saying first, like, as he was doing it, ‘Do you wanna go somewhere else?’ And then him saying to me when I pulled away, he got finished doing what he was doing and I kind of pulled back and he said, ‘Come on, man. I heard you liked me.’ ”
More evidence that Reade had told people about the alleged incident shortly after it happened emerged last week when a video clip from 1993 surfaced that allegedly shows Reade’s mother calling into CNN to ask what her daughter should do after having problems with a “prominent senator.”
Part of the transcript is below:
KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
CALLER: That’s true.
